Topos Institute seminars in 2022
With a new calendar year comes a new seminar! On the 25th of January, our very own David Spivak will be giving the inaugural talk ("Categorical interaction in the polynomial ecosystem") of the Intercats seminar, and the seminars will then be held every other Tuesday at 17:00 UTC. The Topos Institute Colloquium and the Em-Cats seminar series will both be making a return at some point in mid-to-late February as well.
With a new calendar year comes a new seminar: welcome Intercats!
On the 25th of January, our very own David Spivak will be giving the inaugural talk (“Categorical interaction in the polynomial ecosystem”), and the seminars will then be held every other Tuesday at 17:00 UTC. Intercats is organised by David, Toby Smithe, and Jules Hedges; here is how they describe it:
Intercats is a new seminar series on the mathematics of interacting systems, their composition, and their behaviour. Split in equal parts theory and applications, we are particularly interested in category-theoretic tools to make sense of information-processing or adaptive systems, or those that stand in a ‘bidirectional’ relationship to some environment. We aim to bring together researchers from different communities, who may already be using similar-but-different tools, in order to improve our own interaction.
Although by no means an exhaustive or prescriptive list, Intercats seminar topics are likely to be related to the following mathematical topics:
- Generalized lenses, optics, and related structures, such as Chu spaces or Dialectica categories;
- polynomial functors, and their associated ecosystem;
- applications of the foregoing to:
- bidirectional processes,
- dynamical systems,
- wiring diagrams,
- open games,
- database theory,
- automatic differentiation,
- computational statistics,
- machine learning.
Of course, the Topos Institute Colloquium will also be running this year, with an expected start date of mid-to-late February, and the same goes for Em-Cats.
If you wish to keep up to date on all our seminars, then you can subscribe to our seminars mailing list by sending a blank email to seminars+subscribe@topos.institute.
We look forward to seeing you, and wish you a happy new year!